City crews work to clean up Friday’s major snowfall

All city operated pieces of snow removal equipment were at full force by mid morning during the first snow storm of the season to hit a work day. Eduardo Sousa, the city’s director of roadway maintenance told reporters that they had already shifted to winter mode based on what happened last weekend.

“We’ve been in winter mode already, we just had a snow storm a few days ago and the city was out sanding and providing good traction.”

“For example crews who were filling potholes are now removing snow. Last year, because we had a very light winter, we could do some of those summer functions for a longer period of time but this year, we’ve switched our crews earlier to respond properly to the snow storm.”

One hundred and fifty pieces of equipment are city run, and were ready when the storm started moving in around eight Friday morning. “We have our priority system on a sanding frequency. We sand our roads during a storm, every two to four hours. With the amount of equipment we have out there, all of our arterial roads have seen at least one cycle of sanding.”

The storm was expected to taper off late Friday afternoon. “Based on accumulation we’ll make the decision on when to engage our private contractors,” Sousa said.

The city had scheduled paving for one lane between 122 street and Terwillegar for Saturday night, however after the snow hit, they cancelled it. (sj)